Dior and Louis Vuitton Are the Fashion Brands with Best Instagram Stories Engagement

Just four brands featured in a ranking of users with the highest engagement rate on Instagram Stories, released to mark the feature’s first anniversary.

Dior, Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana and Christian Louboutin are the fashion brands with the highest engagement rate on Instagram’s Stories feature. The luxury houses were the only brands in a ranking of 15 fashion industry users released by Facebook-owned Instagram on Wednesday to mark the first anniversary of Stories. The list was otherwise comprised of powerhouse models and influencers, topped by model-actress Emily Ratajkowski, followed by influencer Chiara Ferragni and model Candice Swanepoel. The ranking was based on the cumulative number of story views over the past year amongst top accounts with 10 million or more followers.

Since its launch in August 2016 as Instagram’s answer to Snapchat, Stories’ global audience has reached 700 million, 250 million of which use it daily. It has now surpassed its rival, which has suffered an 82 percent slowing of growth over the past year and 161 million daily users. Eva Chen, Instagram’s head of fashion partnerships, says the success of Stories is thanks to the more informal engagement between a brand and their audience. “The industry wants everything to be picture perfect at all times. If it doesn’t look like a Mario [Testino] or a Patrick [Demarchelier] shoot, oftentimes they don’t want to post it,” she says. “What Stories has really meant is that fashion is now able to be a little bit more authentic, a little bit more down to earth, funnier, scrappier.”

Of the top-ranked accounts, Chen says: “What everyone [in the list] has in common is that you have this sense of being there with someone, and feeling like the walls have come down.” The perspective is similar for Ferragni, who says of her social media persona: “There aren’t boundaries between work and private life, because everything that I do and that I share is who I am and what I really like,” she says. “I guess that’s the reason why my followers love my Instagram Stories. There isn’t a strategy behind my activity. The mantra is: sharing is caring.”